Morning Read: Here Comes Earnings Season

By Brendan Conway

Market check: Dow futures are down slightly this morning and the S&P 500 enters the session a tick below a fresh five-year high. Dow component Alcoa (AA) unofficially kicks off earnings season after the bell today. WhisperNumber.com expects the company to come in one cent ahead of the Street’s expectations. If Alcoa beats the whisper number, it would be pretty unusual. The aluminum giant has only done so in eighteen of fifty reporting periods.

Fund watch: Global retail investors plowed nearly $680 billion in bond funds in 2012,a record, notes my colleague Mike Aneiro, citing data from JPMorgan Chase (JPM). The figure beats the previous high seen in 2009. The same investors sold $23 billion in equity funds, making the gap between bond and equity fund buying also the highest on record. Read more here.

In the news: Four of last year’s five most heavily traded securities were ETFs if you measure by dollar value traded. The number one in the entire U.S. market was an ETF — the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY). The only stock on the top five list is Apple (AAPL). Read more from Credit Suisse’s (CS) quants on the subject here.

About Focus on Funds

As exchange-traded funds and other investing vehicles have ballooned in number, the task of figuring out what works well and what doesn’t has only gotten harder. Barrons.com’s Focus on Funds looks under the hood of ETFs, mutual funds and hedge funds for overlooked values, actionable ideas and the latest pitfalls for fund investors.

Chris Dieterich has covered the U.S. stock market for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. He is a graduate of Regis University and the Missouri School of Journalism.